Monthly Update

Hi all, its been a while since I last wrote and I felt I ought to give a personal update if nothing else. My life this last month has been one of change and growth. It’s like you go through months and years being the same person, at a plateau in development, when suddenly your experiences gel together and propel you to the next level. As a result of this, I’ve been really busy spending my time doing other things and not enough on my writing. I’ve got a dozen draft articles waiting to be published but there just aren’t enough hours in the day to make the final edits 🙁

The genesis behind this was a bad date I had about a month ago. It happened shortly after another date (which I described here) and despite doing my best to be charming and attractive it fell horribly flat. You need to hit bottom before you can start making your way up and at long last I had to admit that despite my time on the dating scene I really had no idea what the hell I was doing. I started reading books about dating and inter-gender relations, and suddenly I started understanding all of my past experiences in a brand new light. It’s embarrassing to think that I spent all this time studying for school, for work, and for my personal finances, and yet I didn’t spend a fraction of the effort on my dating life. No wonder I spent all of these years going nowhere! With a bit more practice I hope to have more luck meeting women and building a solid connection.

As a result, I’ve thrown myself into new kinds of activities. I’ve been going to the gym nearly every day for the last month and have been getting ripped. I build muscle pretty easily, so I’m already getting close to my physcial peak at age 25. Unlike back then, I also ate up all my sugary foods and didn’t buy any to replace them. I haven’t really lost any weight, but relatives are already commenting on my appearance since I’ve replaced my fat with muscle. In another month or two I’ll be quite the catch, much less by this time next year!

I’ve also started working on developing more self-confidence (or inner game) by taking up a martial art. I’ve thought about doing this for a long time but never made a move as I couldn’t decide which one I wanted to try. And where would I find the time? I decided enough was enough and any martial art was better than none, so I went to the nearest dojo of repute and started Hapkido. I’m only a few lessons in, but the confidence that comes with knowing I have an arsenal of punches, kicks and blocks at my disposal should shit hit the fan is a great confidence booster.

And on top of that is the roommate drama I’ve described before. Watching them fight was a great warning in how NOT to approach relationships and deal with conflict. They also taught me that I desperately needed to start professionalizing my operation. I could no longer go with my gut, but actually needed to draft criteria to screen applicants and gather personal information from them in order to set up a background and credit check. It’s already helped me avoid one bad tenant who promised that he “had nothing bad in his record” but turned out to have been evicted from his last apartment. While my service didn’t go into too much detail, the court documents describing the conflict mentioned “forced entry” so thank God I checked.

Finally, my situation at work has gotten to the point of no return. My boss and I have never really been able to get on the same page, and its gotten to the point now where the relationship is beyond repair. In various issues that have come up she’s deliberately taken the worst interpretation of my work and motives in an effort to find ways to ding my performance and either get me fired or put on a corrective action plan (in which case I might as well be fired). As a result, I’ll have to either leave the company or change jobs after my team’s performance reviews in January. Two of my coworkers are going through the same experience and are also planning to leave, which will be devastating to the team since there are only six of us in total! In any case, I’m now examining whether to pursue further education in my field or else start a new career entirely.

So LOT of stuff has been going on.

Financially speaking, not too much has changed from before (and I’ll update this post with real numbers later). I finished paying off the loan from my parents, so that burden is gone, but I’ve also taken some stock losses from one of my trades, so the two balance each other out. That said, I’ve spent a bit more than I’d like these last few weeks as I updated my wardrobe for the dating scene, and my bedroom furnishings – which haven’t changed in the 7 years since I moved back from DC. At least I only plan on buying a lot of this stuff once.

All that said, thank you everyone for your patience with the light posting schedule. I’ve got plenty of content teed up and will try to get it out quickly 😉

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